Lumo or monday CRM: boards or a fixed structure

monday started as a work management platform. Everything is a board with columns, and you decide what a row and a column mean. monday CRM uses that same base for sales: a board for leads, one for deals, one for contacts, with automations you build in plain sentences. It is visual, quick to set up, and teams that already use monday for projects feel at home right away.

That freedom has a downside we often see in practice. After a year every team has its own version of a board. One account manager fills in the amount column, another does not. A company sits on two boards with a slightly different name. There is no fixed place where a person belongs to several organizations, or where you see that someone unsubscribed from all mail. That is not monday's fault. It is what happens when the system allows everything.

Lumo takes the other extreme. The structure is fixed: a person, an organization, a lead, a deal, an activity, a ticket. A person belongs to one or more organizations, with one marked primary. Within that you configure a lot: custom fields in twelve field types, labels, pipelines and roles. With data-quality rules you can really block a save when a required field is empty. You find and merge duplicates, with an undo.

Sales Surge has done more than 150 CRM implementations. What we learned there: a CRM that everyone uses differently produces reports nobody believes. A fixed structure feels tighter at first, but it makes the numbers reliable. Below we go through the themes.

Pipeline and leads

In monday CRM a deal board is a board like any other, with columns you choose. In Lumo the board has a fixed logic. Every stage has a win probability and a limit in days after which a deal is marked as stalled. You see count, value and weighted value per stage, and there is a totals per stage table. Every stage change is stored with its duration. Won and lost are fixed outcomes, with a lost reason from a list. Leads have six statuses, from New to Converted to deal, and become a deal exactly once. That way reports count the same, whoever entered the deal.

Email and calendar

Lumo syncs with Gmail and Google Calendar today. The Outlook and Microsoft 365 integration is planned. Only mail involving a known contact is stored, and it lands on the person, organization and deal automatically. You send from your own Gmail, up to 30 per hour and 200 per day per user. If you work in Outlook, you use the personal BCC address. The calendar works both ways and never sends invitations on your behalf.

Quotes and signing

In monday you handle quotes through features or integrations. In Lumo you create the quote on the deal, from the deal products with quantity, price, discount and billing frequency. The customer signs with a typed name and a six-digit code sent by email. The signed PDF gets an evidence page with time, IP address, device and a SHA-256 hash. Read more about quotes and e-signatures. What you should know: quote documents are in Dutch.

Service

For support in monday you use another monday product or an integration. In Lumo the helpdesk sits in the same product. Tickets move through New, Open, Pending, On hold, Solved and Closed, with SLA targets per priority and a warning at 75 percent. Customers have a portal with a passwordless login link. Live chat on your website lands in the same inbox, and a visitor who leaves an email address becomes a person, a lead and an activity.

Marketing

In Lumo you send email campaigns to segments from your filters, with a live preview of who is excluded and why. Explicit consent is required by default and is checked again at the moment of sending. An unsubscribe applies to the whole workspace, and bounces and complaints are suppressed permanently. Web forms create a person and a lead, with double opt-in. What you should know: templates are HTML, there is no drag-and-drop editor.

Reporting

monday has dashboards with widgets across your boards. Lumo has a report builder: source, measure and breakdown, nine chart types, periods including fiscal year, goal lines and drill-down to records. Because the structure is fixed, a deal means the same thing in every report. Reports that combine tickets and campaigns with deals are still on the backlog.

AI

monday builds its own AI features into the platform. The Lumo AI assistant searches, creates and updates records, and builds segments, campaigns, automations and reports. It has 52 tools, and anything outward-facing or irreversible waits for your approval. It runs with your role, is off per workspace until an admin switches it on, and runs on Google Gemini by default.

Data and security

Lumo has its own login with two-factor authentication, four roles from owner to viewer, separation per workspace and an append-only audit log. For GDPR you export or erase everything about a person, and an erased person does not come back through a form or import. Data is hosted in London. There is no SSO.

Implementation and switching

There is no automatic import from monday. Sales Surge converts your boards by hand into persons, organizations, leads and deals. That is more than copying: we decide together which column becomes which field, and merge duplicate companies afterwards. Read how we approach implementation and onboarding.

monday is genuinely good at a few things.

• Flexibility. You build any board you want. For a team with an unusual process, that is valuable.
• Visual and quick. Teams get going fast, including people who never used a CRM.
• Project work. Sales and projects on the same platform. Lumo has customer projects, but no general project planning.
• Automations in plain sentences. Easy to build for anyone on the team.
• Integrations and mobile apps. Many ready-made integrations, and apps for the road. Lumo is a web app.

If your whole organization already works in monday and the CRM is mostly a list that runs alongside projects, monday is strong there.